Your letter is sealed and is sent. You are mine!--
By now he has broken the wax.... If there flutters
Some dust in his nostrils, who, who will divine
That thus it was poisoned?--Our alchemist utters
No word!--You are happy? and I?--Oh, I feel
That I love and am loved.--The tidings comes heavy
To-night to the King; you are there; you will reel--
Will faint!--Now away to the royal levee.
Note.--In this poem, which originally appeared in a volume of
mine entitled _Lyrics and Idylls_, published in 1890, some
hypercritical critic in the New York _Nation_ accused me of
imitating Browning's _The Laboratory_. The truth of the matter
is that the poem was written ten months before I had ever read
Browning's _Dramatic Lyrics_, and was suggested to me by the
reading of the following passage in one of E. T. W. Hoffman's
(the German Poe's) stories. The passage occurs in _Mademoiselle
De Scuderi_ and is as follows: "The poisons which Sainte Croix
prepared were of so subtle a nature that if the powder (called by
the Parisians _Poudre de Succession_, or Succession Powder) were
prepared with the face exposed, a single inhalation of it might
cause instantaneous death. Sainte Croix therefore, when engaged
in its manufacture, always wore a mask of fine glass. One day,
just as he was pouring a prepared powder into a phial, his mask
fell off, and inhaling the fine particles of the poison, he fell
dead on the spot."